Surely making DVD's ain't this difficult
 

Hi,

I recently acquired the Sony DRU-510A DVD writer and the LSX MPEG Encoder plug-in for Premiere. Both come recommended by the forum so the problem probably does not rest there.

My project is about 54 minutes long and from Premiere 6.0 I encoded the file to create an .mpg file of 2,65Gig which was saved to one of the harddrives. This process took 8 hours..........which appears excessive to me. My PIII 733 with 512M ram may well be underpowered and when checking under W2000 it shows my CPU usage at 100% with Ram usage running at about 60%.

I then attempted to write this file to DVD using the proprietry software that came with the writer, MYDVD. It takes forever to open the .mpg file and then when you select BURN is starts encoding again and by the looks of the status bar this process will take yet another 8 hours. I have aborted the process as I must be missing the boat somewhere.

Finally, during this entire process I also realised that I probably was running out of drive space for the swap files, the DRU-510 requires about 10Gigs of free space. I then decided this was an ideal opportunity to install the 180gig Deskstar I had laying about for the past week. I used Partition Magic to format the drive NFTS and it returns as available space 153 odd gig. Is is my BIOS that is not recognising the rest of the space, I have had this before and had to reflash the BIOS.

Can one select from Premiere 6.0 to encode directly to the DVD Writer?

Thanks
Any comments on the other issues will be appreciated.
Andrew

The disk space question is the difference between marketing department and your OS. The advertised size of disks figures 1000kb is a mb. Your OS calculates it as 1024kb per mb. Any remaining difference is used in formatting and files for OS usage.

Use either Premiere or MYDVD for encoding, not both. Do you have any software that will just control the burner? Can you set MYDVD to just burn and not encode? You might try letting MYDVD do the encoding and see if it will burn the file. Sorry I can't be of much help with a PC.

Hi,

Thanks Jeff.

OK so I should not be encoding twice. Sounds perfectly logical, think I saw and option in MYDVD on installation to not use the decoding and hence it will become a burner only. Will do this an see what the outcome is.

Cheers
Andrew

Today I will SIEZE the DAY and sort the things out

Well this isnt too much help but....

Workflow for dvd authoring should be. Edit in Prem. Export to mpeg-2. Import mpeg-2 & other assets. Write to disc/dlt.

Some people would export a non-mpeg-2 format then encode to mpeg-2 with a 3rd party encoder. Like FCPro ref movie and encode with Compressor. Also(not really a win thing I dont think) export the audio separately.

I'm not too familiar with Prem's output or what options it has but encoding 2-pass VBR with a software encoder with a DV source usually would take 1:3 or 4. So and hour should take 3-4 hours to encode. So that sounds about right for a PIII. I know if you have a dual xeon and procoder(canopus) you can get that time right down.

No prem isn't a dvd-authoring app so you'll need to write to disk with something else. Be careful as just cause you get files onto a dvd it doesn't mean it is a dvd-video. You can make dvd-data disc too. When you are done you should have a VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS on the disc.

Jake

I'm stuck with MyDVD also for the moment and recently had a situation where, of four MPEG-2 files imported to it, two required further processing and two did not. I'm fairly sure that two were made in Premiere (with the Canopus softMPG encoder) and two in TMPGEnc. I don't know which got the extra treatment from MyDVD, or what that treatment was, but I don't recall it taking as long as creating the files in the first place.

David Hurdon

Hi

I thought I could disable the encoding done by MyDVD but on two or three uninstall and re-installs the option has not shown. Must have been smoking my socks.

As you have had more success than I David perhaps you could throw some light on the issue. I opened MyDVD and selected the first option, to create a new DVD. I fetched my "movie" which was already encoded through Prem 6.0 in .mpg format. I did not require any other fancy stuff as I am experimenting at the moment so I selected "Burn". It created two other files I later discovered in other directories and started "encoding" again.

Does that sound like the process you use?


Cheers
Andrew

Hi Jeff,

<<The advertised size of disks figures 1000kb is a mb. Your OS calculates it as 1024kb per mb. Any remaining difference is used in formatting and files for OS usage.>>

That was my understanding with regards to HD Capacities, but then is it possible to expalin this???

My 20gig WD measures 20,5gig
My 40gig WD measures 40,0gig as does my other identical drive
My 185gig Deskstar measures 137,4gig (is this not a little to far out the ball park)?

Any other thoughts?

Cheers
Andrew

Generally MyDVD will accept my MPEG-2s as is, video and audio, and simply go about authoring the folders and files a DVD player looks for. Your process and mine sound the same, and we both have run into some files that need some further work in MyDVD and some that don't. I can't explain that to myself or anyone else, but as I said, when it happens to me it doesn't add excessively to the time frame. I have a P4-1.8 GHz processor with 512 MB of DDRSDRAM.

David Hurdon

Hi,

Have just burnt my first DVD yeeeeehaaaah.

I downloaded a trial version of a DVD authoring program of 120megs and it was corrupt ughhhhh. I then downloaded another trial version WinDVD Creator II which is what I used. The video looks fine and ended taking 2,3 gigs of space.

The payback is jerky and I think this is due to processing power more than anything else. Will check it on a work machine tomorrow.

Thanks for the help.

Cheers
Andrew

reply to andrew leigh
 

Hi,
Just browsing and I noticed no-one directly answered your query about the 137Gig limit.

I recently bought two 200gig western digital se's, and was shocked when they only showed up under XP Pro as 137 gigs or thereabouts.

However, OS' which do not have Large block addressing activated have 137gigs or thereabouts as an upper limit for harddrive size.

Fear not, simply installing service pack 1 introduces the large block addressing, and now my "200gig" drives register at about 186gigs - which as someone mentioned is the deficit from my OS measuring a megabyte as 1024 bytes and the marketeers which measure one at 1000bytes.

There is a registry hack to enable large block addressing for xp pro without installing SP1, but I think it's not the best idea.
If you're not running XP then I guess you need to search for updates to your OS.

>I then decided this was an ideal opportunity to install the >180gig Deskstar I had laying about for the past week. I used >Partition Magic to format the drive NFTS and it returns as >available space 153 odd gig. Is is my BIOS that is not >recognising the rest of the space, I have had this before and >had to reflash the BIOS.

Andrew,

Something isn't quite right. Are you sure you partitioned the disk properly ? Under WinXP, I have a 180 gig disk that I formatted as NTFS using Partition Magic 8.0. The disk Properties reads Capacity = 171 GB (184, 410,742,784 bytes). Some earlier revisions of Partition Magic warn that disks over 160 GB aren't
tested, so the problem may be the partition software.

Hi,

My OS is W2000P and the mobo is an old ASUS P3V4X which I have updated the BIOS on. On an Australian forum they indicate that my mobo will never see more than 131gig.

I have ordered an ATA card based on advice in thius forum. This will apparently sort out the issue.

Any other thoughts?

Cheers
Andrew

Andrew,

If your mobo won't recognize partitions larger than 131 gig,
just make another partition. You have nothing to lose, other than, heh heh, possibly your data. Ohhh, I shouldn't have said that. Just resize your existing parition to 131, and make another with the remaining space.

Your decision to go with the ATA sounds good to me.

Andrew,

If your mobo won't recognize partitions larger than 131 gig,
just make another partition. You have nothing to lose, other than, heh heh, possibly your data. Ohhh, I shouldn't have said that. Just resize your existing parition to 131, and make another with the remaining space.

Your decision to go with the ATA sounds good to me.

Thanks Gints,

will stay with the ATA card as a short term solution but in another post under the PC Editing Forum I have decided to upgrade to a newer better mobo.

Cheers
Andrew